A breakthrough of sorts...

Virgil Carter, a painter from Delaware offered me some gentle advice about the way artists in the rennaisance treated space in landscapes. For the most part, they divided the picture plane into fore, mid, and background planes and chose ONE (and only one) of those three for their focal point. It could be either of those planes, but only one. And once it was chosen, that is where most of the bold color, the higher contrast, the harder edges went. All the things that attract a viewer's eye were accentuated, and the secondary planes were treated in a more subdued, less detailed fashion. It seems like such a simple thing, and something I knew in theory long ago... but "knowing" something and remembering to use it are two differnt things.


I tend to edit what I see intuitively when I'm outdoors - my own eye is drawn to the focus of my chosen composition, and the other elements recede as they 'should' in a painting. But when I'm indoors in the Winter, working primarily from photographs, my mind's eye is less able to breakthrough the plane of the photograph, to project and edit itself in the photographed landscape. I had been getting bogged down in extraneous detail. I was treating almost everything as equal: equal values, equal color strength, with too much fussy and poorly executed detail everywhere. I was too often painting the photo, not the place.

Virgil's simple explanation of a complex visual phenomenon - one of the primary languages of landscape painting - pointed the way through an aspect of my recent paintings that had been bothering me, but that I couldn't quite put my finger on. The painting above was the first with those thoughts in mind, and a big improvement over my most recent work, I think.

Things to do with an iPad Brushes app

Uluru

For several weeks I've been painting the Australian desert. Though I did live in Sydney for a time as a young boy, I never really went much further west than the Blue Mountains and Wagga Wagga. This image is of Uluru - the massive and famous rock at Australia's center sometimes known as Ayers Rock. There nearest town of any size, Alice Springs, is 200 miles away, and I've never been there. But my brother Curt went in 1986. The sunrises and especially sunsets are famous here, with the rock glowing as the chnaging low sun hits it. This arrid landscape has a hold on my imagination to this day and I've been using that point of entry - a deep and abiding connection to the land of my formative years - to keep me painting as the weather forces me indoors. Thre great bulk of this one - the rock, the sky, the first washes of the forground -was completed in less than 45 minutes, and I had enough sense to touch nothing above the mid-point again. But the next day (this morning) I worked on the values of the land, trying to depict the hardy spinifex grasses that are able to survive here.

Why create?

I have a profound desire to give myself over to the act of creation, making something where nothing existed before. I play guitar. I paint. I write. I interpret a set of circumstances in four dimensions so that I can leverage it's future. I do these things not for the things created themselves - the songs, the paintings, the story or the rewards that come from the succesful management of some business function - but for the process of creation and the joy it gives me. I do judge and value the outcome of the activity by my own standards... but not above the doing. 

Why is that?